As a you should be fully aware that both searchers and search engines love unique, fresh, quality information. However it is not uncommon to come across sites that repeating content issues either created accidentally or deliberately. Duplicate content has become a huge topic of discussion and has gained it's hazardous meaning thanks to new search engine filters.
Duplicate content using it's general meaning relates to pages with identical or similar content either in the same domain or spread across external web pages. The information that is classed as duplicate does not have to be exact and could simply be appreciably similar.
There is so much talk flying around about what percentage of your page would need to be similar to another in order for it to fall into the duplicate content category and harm your site. However there is no distinct test and search engines would never base their decisions on a simple test of content percentage, in fact search engines do take into account other factors such as site authority, domain age, link popularity from